


From What I've Tasted of Desire

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, He gets better, In the Flesh Fusion, M/M, major character death—sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:37:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2476682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Flesh AU -- Q came back from the dead on a Tuesday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From What I've Tasted of Desire

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this one was "sad zombie!Q", which tells you almost everything you need to know, really. It's an In the Flesh AU, though I don't borrow any of the characters from that show.

Q came back from the dead on a Tuesday.  Of course, he wasn’t aware that it was a Tuesday, not at the time—that’s something that comes back to him in chunks, in pieces, in bites of memory that leave him spewing black, rotted bile in the loo once he’s back.  Once he’s really back, that is, meaning medicated and lucid.  2009 was a rough year for everybody; Q’s got the blessed honor of being the only MI:6 candidate in fifteen years to have failed bomb deactivation so spectacularly, and then he got to come back from the grave to be told about his failing score.  It’s humiliating: once on the fast track toward real power and clout in MI:6’s weapons development lab, now he’s got a pity position making tea for the few agents left who can stand the thought of a rotter preparing drinks for the survivors of the Rising.  He tucks his head low, pushes the trolley on toward Medical.

“It’s for your own good, you know,” Medic Pitt says as he holds Q’s shoulder.  The Neurotriptyline sometimes makes him convulse, brings him all over shudders and, now the brain cells are coming back, a shivery sensation of cold fire on his skin.  “Try to hold still.”

“And the dreams?” Q asks.  He knows what Pitt will say; he says it every day.  Q asks every day anyway.

“Nothing for it, I’m afraid.  Too many delicate chemicals going on in there.  Wouldn’t want to mess up the balance and have you go rab—”  Pitt stops himself, abashed.

“Mad,” Q supplies helpfully, wiping his palms on his trousers.  “Same time tomorrow?”

“Unless you’ve got someone at home who can do it for you now?” Pitt says, then backs up.  “Even then, it’s best to keep the injections at roughly the same time each day.  Keeps you regular.”

“Like coffee,” Q remarks.  “It used to send me to the toilet.  Every morning like clockwork; I suppose it still would, though for a different reason.”

“Oh, yeah?” Pitt asks.  Q grins in the face of the green wash to his skin.  Though Pitt is among the most accepting of the survivors here at MI:6, he’s still remarkably squeamish about the details of Q’s.  Of his illness.  His state.

“I’ll let you imagine,” Q tells him, and it’s not a kindness.  Pitt goes greener.  “Same time tomorrow.”  He lets himself out.

They’re waiting when he comes out: the same motley of agents who like to gawp and stare while he’s still feeling vulnerable from the effects of the chemicals pinging in his blood like water droplets dancing on a hotplate.  

“Take ‘em out, then.”  It’s Yancy, leaning on Q’s trolley so he can’t escape.  “C’mon, we know you only use them because you’re a vain thing.  We know,” Yancy says, leaning in close as he’ll dare, though it’s still several feet away.  He cants his shoulders in a parody of intimate conversation.  “We know you were given the choice of blue or brown like all the rest of them.”

He can’t help it.  Q’s hand flutters at his cheek, fingertips skimming near his eyes, near the contact lenses that are supposed to make his stare more tolerable to the survivors.  They’re green, and Yancy is wrong—he wasn’t given a choice.  He was a guinea pig, one of the first to get different colors.  His eyes had been green, before, but the lenses are all the wrong color green, a green like grass, a Lincoln green that looks fake and incongruous, and when he sees them in the mirror they’re proof that all the rest of it—the flesh toned mousse that gives him a vague, mealy skintone, the thin plastic of his stitching tracing up the side of his face in fractals like a lightning bolt, the “realistic” tint of his lips that he’d had to tone down because his actual tones from life had made him look like a schoolkid playing dress up in his mum’s makeup when recreated—all the rest of it is as fake as the contacts.  He looks less alive with them, and he doesn’t fool anybody, much less himself.

“You know I can’t, Yancy,” Q tells him, even though he knows better.  Responding to Yancy never works.

“Imagine a rotter putting on airs!” Yancy crows, and Q’s stomach sinks.  “He thinks he’s pretty with his green eyes.  You stopped wearing lippy.  Pharmacy clue in to the fact that you don’t have a sister, then?”

“Pick one thing to make fun of today, Yancy: queer or dead.  Don’t tax yourself,” Q says.  He feels exhausted, the Neurotriptyline shakes beginning to form in his wrists, in his shoulders.  He’s meant to sit down after the injections, but there’s no sneaking by the leering gang that’s growing larger as people nearby realize what’s going on.

“How about stupid?”  And there’s Wallace; add Keller and the hellish trifecta will be complete.  Q spots him a few faces back in the crowd, and of course he’s there.  Of course, because Q’s life—first and second—isn’t complete without as thorough of a humiliation as possible.  Wallace continues, “—and came back, after blowing himself to smithereens!  I don’t know if that’s bravery or sheer idiocy.  Perhaps it’s brains.”

“Braaaaaains,” Keller chimes in.  Someone snickers.

“It’s having been top of my recruitment class and stupidly believing I still had a life to come back to,” Q snaps.  Wallace’s the first one to start laughing, but it doesn’t take long for the others to join in.  Keller throws him an incomprehensible look even as he joins the group.  Yancy’s eyes are piercing.

“But mate, you don’t have a life at all.  You’re dead.”

It takes him twenty minutes gripping the edge of his cart in the kitchenette to stop the shaking.  By the time he walks back out, it’s as if nothing is wrong; he’s reapplied his mousse carefully, and eye drops to quell the stickiness of his contacts, and he’s sure and steady again, almost confident.  The first three desks he reaches refuse tea with long, disdainful looks, but he won’t let himself get down about it.  He’s got Partially Deceased Syndrome, and there’s nothing he can do about that.  

He finishes his shift and heads home; the PDS carriage on the Tube is full, and he looks through the glass longingly at the half-empty carriage in front of them.  He could sit, perhaps, instead of avoiding the blank, glassy expressions of PDS sufferers trying to pretend that it’s normal to be like this, or the taunting grins of uncovered people with waxy, grey skin and staring white eyes.  They resent people like him, assimilationists, but many of them will end up dead again, mistaken for extremists and terrorists.  Not blending in is not an option.  When he gets home, he looks again at the dry bowl where he would have fed the cat back when they both were alive and pours himself into bed.

MI:6 is still the next morning, solemn and silent and striking.  It reminds him of his first day back, but today, no one has time for more than half-hearted glares in his direction.  He serves the tea, up and down each long row and each level of the building until it’s time to head to Medical again.  When he gets to the door, there are armoured guards.

“I—can I?  Through, please,” Q asks, because he’s seen fuckoff huge guns like these before.  He’s seen them pointed at his head.

“Oh, it’s alright,” Pitt says, emerging from the warren of frosted glass.  The guards step aside and Q shivers, cold.

“It’s freezing down here,” Q complains, glancing over his shoulder at the stern guards.

“Oh, could you tell?” Pitt asks, distracted.  “It’s only we’ve got an agent Returned this morning.”

Q can hear the capital.  Returned.  He swallows.  “Which one is it?” he asks. _Why didn’t you destroy it on sight?_ He doesn’t.

“It’s Double-oh Seven,” Pitt says, mouth pulling into a frown.  And yeah, Double-oh Seven’s been missing for a long while, disappeared off the grid shortly before the Rising.  Q knows there had been some hope, even after he’d Returned himself, that Double-oh Seven had merely gone to ground again, hiding out in some tropical boudoir with a beautiful woman and a bottle of rum.  As the months had stretched on, as the medications had been developed and the Returned had begun to filter home, he’d seen that hope fade and die, to be replaced with a new hope: that the agent might never come back.  Even now, Q can’t imagine what would happen with a Returned Double-oh.

“Oh.”

Q lets Pitt guide him into the sickbay, where an entire corner is swallowed in swaths of white net curtain and beeping machinery.  “Oh, blast,” Pitt mutters, dropping the injection gun onto one of the beds.  “Forgot the bottle.  I’ll be right back.”

Because it’s not dangerous for Q to be in the room with Double-oh Seven, of course.  Not if he’s Returned—PDS sufferers don’t attack each other, after all, not the way they do humans—and if he’s honest, Q only feels a residual trill of fear skitter up his back on sharp points.  He waits, and doesn’t look over at the silhouette on the other bed, now sitting.

Pitt returns, bustling with the bottle, and before long, he’s curling his hand around Q’s collarbone.  Obediently, Q drops his chin to his chest, exposing the hole in the back of his neck.  Pitt tuts as he slots the needle into place.  “I want you to rest in here for half an hour before you go out there again today,” Pitt says, and Q nods as far as the needle in his spine will let him.  “You’ve been observed as woozy after your shot—”  The crisp glass feel of the Neurotriptyline is startling, and cold.  Pitt continues as he pulls the injector out and begins cleaning up again.  “—and I don’t want you falling.  Why haven’t you reported any weakness?”

“Didn’t seem important,” Q says, eyes growing heavy as he sinks onto the bed.

“All symptoms are important,” Pitt scolds.  “Lie back now.”  He heads out, leaving Q with the still figure behind the curtain.

“Did they give you a shot?”  Double-oh Seven’s voice is rich and gravelly.  Q tucks himself tighter onto the bed and doesn’t look at him.  Seven waits.

“Yes,” Q says finally.

“You let them?”

“Have to.  It’s the law.”  Q remembers that Seven has been away, perhaps missed much of the Rising.  “Didn’t they give you one, too?”

“I’m not dead, so no.”  And that’s the conversation over, then.  Q huffs to himself, curling his frigid fingers into his armpits as if that will warm them.  It doesn’t—he’s cold all over, so why would it?—but he leaves them.  “I’ve offended you.”

Q doesn’t respond.

“Partially deceased, then.  I’m not, though, either way,” Seven continues.

“They think you are,” Q says.

“They haven’t done the examination yet,” Seven tells him.  “I may have, er.  Intimidated.  I may have intimidated Medical the last time I was in.  They think I’m a medicated zombie—”

“Don’t.  Use that word,” Q says, cutting him off, even though he knows Seven knows probably twelve different ways to kill him without moving to cross the space between their beds.  He rolls over to regard the man sitting on the edge of the bed, hand still tangled in the curtain he’s tugged open.  “It’s offensive.”

Seven’s mouth quirks.  “Sorry.”

Q watches him.  The man’s thick with muscle, covered over in scars.  There’s a bad stitch job done over one eyebrow—his breath catches, even though he doesn’t need it.  The man’s eyes are.  They’re.  “You’re not,” he says bluntly.  “They’re idiots.”

“Well,” Seven says with a slow grin.  “You can tell from across the room.  How?”

“We can’t sense each other or any such bollocks,” Q protests, flustered.  “It doesn’t work like that.  It’s just.”

“Just?”

“Your eyes,” Q admits.  Seven’s eyes are bright stars of blue in his craggy, beaten face.  “They can’t make contacts like that.”

Seven looks thoughtful.

::

Double-oh Seven is leaning on his cart when he leaves Pitt’s office a few days later—that’s not uncommon; he’s developed a cold-eyed shadow recently—and Q sighs.  “Coffee?  Or tea?”

“Third option,” Seven says, rifling through the cart’s boxes.

“There’s no whisky on the cart, Double-oh Seven,” Q tells him, and he can feel the shy smile that’s trying to work its way into the corner of his mouth.  He shoves it down and tries to look vague and disapproving.

“You’ve never seen Working Girl?  Children these days,” Seven clucks, snagging a couple of tea bags from the trolley.

“Thirsty?” Q asks.

“I’ve heard these things are good for undereye circles,” Seven tells him.  He holds the bags up by his face, the purple rings of exhaustion stark next to the dark paper.  “Tell me, do I have undereye circles, Q?”

He can’t stop himself; Q laughs.  Seven grins like he’s won something, and Q spends the rest of the next several hours bubbling with pleasure.

He gets a lunch break, even though actually eating makes him violently ill.  It’s required by law, but as a PDS sufferer it’s shorter than everyone else’s, half an hour to their hour because he doesn’t actually need to eat.  He takes his lunch at the park, watching as busy office workers sit and force themselves through soggy triangle sandwiches.  It’s already cold out, the leaves a yellow mat on the ground that’s going slick with rot and damp.  People drift toward the empty spot on his bench but recoil when he glances up at them with his plastic green eyes, few subtle about their revulsion.  He’s got a sandwich next to him for camouflage, ripping the stale, squishy-wet bread into crumbs for the pigeons that have come to expect him by now.

The bench creaks under Seven’s weight as he sinks onto the seat.  “You’re a walking stereotype,” Seven offers.

It stings.  “How so?” Q asks, scattering crumbs.  “Self-loathing zombie buys lunch to pretend to be alive?”

Seven is silent; when Q glances up at him, he’s thoughtful.  “No,” Seven tells him, shaking his head.  “Government man in the park feeding pigeons.”

“I,” Q starts, embarrassed.  Seven grabs the untouched half of his sandwich, biting into it, then winces.  

“Prawn mayo?”  Seven sputters; he makes a show of rubbing his tongue with a handkerchief as if he’s a child, and Q laughs.

“Can’t give them chicken and dressing,” he offers with a careless shrug.  

Seven considers.  “You could offer them a cheese ploughman’s.  Vegetarian option,” he suggests.

“Do birds like piccalilli?” Q ponders philosophically.

“More than they like prawn cocktail, I’m sure.”

“You have a point.”

They spend the rest of Q’s lunch half hour in companionable silence, and as they walk back into the building Seven waggles his eyebrows at Q.  There’s a secretary from Upstairs waiting for them, and she hauls a flirting, unprotesting Seven off into the shadowy depths of the lift.  Q pretends not to notice, and certainly doesn’t try not to laugh at his antics.

That night at home, he turns on the radiator for the first time since he died.  

::

It’s humiliating.  Q stands by his cart, trying desperately not to tangle his fingers in the bottom hem of his jumper, as Wallace continues.

“I’m not saying—but all I’m saying is I don’t think it’s right.  I just don’t think it’s safe, really—not really—to have it touching food for healthy people is all,” Wallace insists stridently.

Tanner looks serious.  

“I wear rubber gloves,” Q cuts in to argue his case.  “I do.  Proper ones, and I don’t touch anything without them.  The—the sugar, it’s all individually sealed, and the milk.  All I do is boil water and cart the trolley around.”

“Sounds dead useless, if you ask me,” Yancy mutters.  He sniggers.  “Get it?  Dead?  Useless?”

“We make our own tea in TSS,” Keller adds, and the simple statement is a punch meant to wound.  Q’s never seen the inside of TSS, even though his background checks have all gone through.  Somewhere in the files, there’s even a work ID for him stamped with his name,TSS Division.  Void.  Deceased.  They do make their own tea in TSS, and Q’s jaw clicks shut.  “I’m not saying it’s because he’s—you know.  I don’t think Boothroyd minds them, really.  It’s just—does it make sense?  A corpse making food to put in your body?”

And Q can feel his fingers curling with shame and hurt and anger, and he tucks his fists into his sleeves because he doesn’t dare touch the trolley and if he doesn’t do something he’ll hit them.  He will.  He’ll hit them, and then he’ll be sent back to the treatment center, and then—and then.  He shivers, curling into the thick knit of his jumper.

“You alright?” Tanner asks him, and Q knows he only cares because he might be going rabid.  He might start spitting black bile and coagulated chunks of rotten blood, he might lunge for brains at any moment.  He feels faint.

“I’m fine,” he says distantly.  His head feels swimmy.

Tanner’s brows drop, and Q watches his eyes go to the places people check when a PDS sufferer is starting to go: eyes, cheekbones, nose, jaw, mouth.  He touches the dip beneath his nose to check for wet and every eye in the room follows the movement; his fingers come back dry and clean but he backs away still, ducking his head to dodge.  He shakes his head, hunches his shoulders, tries to make himself small with everyone staring.

“I’m okay.  It’s—I am.  I’m okay.”

“It’s time for your shot, isn’t it?” Tanner asks, and it couldn’t be any more obvious or any more dismissive.  Q nods and slinks away.

Pitt doesn’t look too surprised to see him there; someone must have phoned ahead.  He’s already got the injection gun prepared, and Seven glances up from where he’s buttoning his shirt when Pitt leads him to the bed.

“Bond’s on his way out,” Pitt tells Q as he slots the frigid nozzle up with the hole in his neck.  Q nods; it doesn’t matter.  He avoids Seven’s stare as the ice builds in his spine from the medicine, but he can’t bite back the wince.  It’s like frozen shards, painful.  He curls his fingers inside his sleeves again.  Pitt finishes, guides him down to the mattress, and leaves.

Seven is quiet.  Q’s breath—he doesn’t need it but it comes fast anyway, hitching as if sobbing, and he almost wishes he could weep for the hurt trapped inside.  He covers his face with his hands and breathes cold air on them.

“Are you alright?” Seven asks quietly after a long moment.

Q nods, then because he realizes Seven may not be able to see it, whispers, “Yes.”

“Liar.”

The laugh is more a hiccough, short and sharp.  Q peers through his fingers at Seven.  “Bond?”

“That’s me: Bond.  James Bond.”

It suits, strangely.  Masculine.  Q tastes it on his tongue for a moment before he realizes he’s smiling.  “I didn’t know that.”

Bond laughs.  “What did you think my name was, then?”

“I didn’t, really.  Double-oh Seven.  Seven, usually.  I’m Q.”

Bond smiles indulgently.  “I know who you are.”

His trolley is waiting for him when he feels his limbs can support him again and he begins to make his way back to the floor.  It’s been restocked, and there’s a keycard taped to a note—“Major Boothroyd prefers lemon.—T”  Q knows without checking his security clearance has gone up.

Major Boothroyd is wonderful.  He’s just as Q remembers him from those few interviews nearly three years ago: funny and kind, something like an impish grandfather.  He makes it a point to praise Q’s tea making skills until Q’s sure he’d blush if he could; as it is he still has to duck into the washroom to blot at the smear of skin-tone mousse along his collar and touch up the streaks of grey showing through on his jaw from trying to hide in his shoulders.

He’s fussing with tiny ribbons of lemon peel because he can’t bear the thought of going back upstairs just yet when Boothroyd turns to him one day and asks him how he’d fix the transistor on the desk.

“I can’t,” Q tells him.  It feels like a panic attack coming, fast and fluttery, as Boothroyd slides the workmat and soldering gun over in his direction.  “No, I—”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.  Soldering guns aren’t dangerous.  My grandsons can use them,” Boothroyd insists, and when Q makes the mistake of looking up at the room, the eyes of every tech there are on him, wondering what he’ll do.  He cringes into his jumper again, inching in the trolley’s direction.

“Really, I—”  Q’s mortified by the thickness of his voice, the way it wobbles, and he swallows hard, turning to fiddle with the sugar packets again.  “Let me make you a cup of tea, but then I really have to go get on to Accounting.”

Boothroyd is silent.  Q bites his lip—it’s an old habit, a leftover from Uni—until he remembers the mousse he’s rubbing away and freezes.  Everything he does is only making this moment worse; his fingers shake as he fetches a paper cup and sets it out.

“I was quite excited to have you,” Boothroyd tells him suddenly.  “Top of your class—top of your training class, too.  Sharp as a whip.  Perhaps a little arrogant, a little cocky, but you were going to grow out of that pretty soon.  They always do.  They have some little accident and—”

But it hadn’t been.  It hadn’t been a little accident, and they’d scraped what they could of his face off the bunker floor and given him a funeral for dying in the line of service, as if he’d earned that.  Q swallows hard, dry eyes stinging.  Boothroyd reaches out to him, pats him on the hand gently.

“You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you?” he asks.  Q nods, mute.  “Bring some ideas.”

Keller’s waiting in the lift, silent as they ride with the trolley up and up and up.  He turns to Q.  “Wallace is a bell end,” he offers, and for a moment, Q’s breath catches in incandescent rage.  How dare he play nice after—some of his anger must show, because Keller shrinks back, chastened.  “Well, he is,” he says, as if Wallace’s behavior excuses his own.

“You tried to get me fired,” Q reminds him.

“I never,” Keller denies, but it’s weak, empty.  

“You did.  And you haven’t talked to me since—”

“What was I supposed to say, even?  ‘Hallo, Q, please don’t eat my face off’?”

Q feels sick.  “How about ‘sorry’?  ‘Sorry for being an arsehole to you since you got back’ or ‘sorry for taking your spot on the TSS team when you died’ or ‘sorry for letting you suck me off’—”  Keller goes pale and queasy at the image, and Q could smack him.  He raises his voice, instead.  “No, ‘sorry for letting you suck my cock and then never speaking to you again’, or even maybe just ‘sorry for only talking to you in the first place because I thought I could cheat off your tests’!”

“I didn’t,” Keller tries again.

“Didn’t tell anyone?  I know.  Didn’t think anyone would find out?  I’m sure.  Didn’t—” and Q could kick himself for the weakness in his voice, “Didn’t even come to my funeral?  Really?”

“How could I?” Keller demands, and.  “Did you see the photos of what happened to you?  Do you know what you looked like?  What was left of you?”

Q’s chest shudders with breath.  “No.”  He’s lying.  It’s one of the first things he’d done after being released from treatment—hacking his own file at MI:6.  The photos were horrific.

“As for the rest of it, that’s bullshit.  You’re never going to be part of TSS, whether or not I took your spot, as you believe.  You’re barely MI:6 as it stands.  I earned my spot by _not dying_ , and I’ll say I did a damned better job at it than you.”

The cold is trembling up his arms, and Q tucks his fingertips in his armpits again.  “Nice,” he says faintly.  The world is greying around him, and in the distance he can hear Keller’s frantic voice.  He sinks to a seat by the trolley as the klaxon overhead begins to wail.

They’re met at the floor by armoured agents; he’s used to guns in his face and he barely notices Keller bolting from the lift as he raises his head to face the man behind the rifle that’s inches from his nose.  “I think,” he says quietly, breath ragged, “I need to see Medic Pitt.”

::

“Stress response,” Pitt says to himself, checking the chart.  “Strange.  Any unusual side effects lately?”

Q thinks of the pervasive cold that’s invaded his life recently and curls his fingers in his jumper sleeves.  He’s heard of experiments being done on the Risen, of people with unusual responses to the Neurotriptyline disappearing.  He shakes his head.  “Er, no.  Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Pitt hums, jotting checkmarks down the page.  “Even so, I’d like to keep you for observation overnight.  I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I don’t feel like I’m about to go rabid.”  The words are hard to say, but he needs to, has to.  He has to make them come out, to reassure Pitt that he’s okay, that he’s safe to keep around.  

Pitt gives him a queer, pitying look.  “I wasn’t saying you were.”  He looks at the form again, then stops again.  “I—Q, do you have a therapist?”

It’s such a strange question that it throws him a moment.  Q blinks, and he actually has to think about it.  He has no idea how he’s supposed to answer, which response will be the one Pitt wants to hear.  He doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t.

Pitt taps his pen to the page, clearly searching for words.  “You don’t—we had training together, do you remember?  Years ago.”

“Sorry, no,” Q admits.  “I—with everything that—some things are a bit of a blur.  I really….”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Pitt tells him, scratching the nib of his pen on the page.  “It was just a couple of classes, early ones.  But you.  That is to say, you’re different.  From how you were.”

“Most of us are.  The Zombie Apocalypse will do that to you.”

“You shouldn’t use that word.  It’s like—” Pitt stops, flushing.  Q knows which word it’s like.  “It’s a slur.”

“No, ‘rotter’ is a slur.  Zombie is just—”

“It’s a slur,” Pitt snaps.  “It’s just as ugly.  You’re not a monster from a horror film.  You’re sick.  You’ve got a manageable disease, and you work hard to make people forget about you because you think they’re going to forget you’re sick while they’re at it.  They won’t.  The ones who’re likely to forget about you are the same ones who’ll remember your disease, until all that’s left of you is the PDS, until they can call you things like ‘rotter’ and ‘zombie’.”

“And fag,” Q adds quietly.  “You don’t have to preach at me, Medic Pitt.  This isn’t my first time playing this particular game.”

“Then you know how you lose it,” Pitt tells him.  “And you’re losing right now.”

::

Bond visits him in the middle of the night.  It’s far too late for visitors and he’s been staring at the wall listlessly, but when he hears the footfall on the lino Q knows and scrambles for his contacts, at least.  His hands are still fumbling the case when Bond clears the curtain; Bond cocks his head like a dog that hears something high and far.

“What are you doing?” Bond asks.

“Hold on a moment.  I—”

“Q.”

And he doesn’t mean to, never meant to turn the full white eeriness of his gaze upon Bond, but he glances up and Bond’s wince hits him like a lorry.  He ducks his chin and looks away, still working on the contact lens case.  “Hold on a moment,” he repeats.

His eyes are dry with insomnia and the lenses feel cool and scratching as they settle in; he tips his chin back to add the drops and blinks away the spill that feels like cold tears on his cheeks.  It’s dark enough in the room to disguise his waxy pallor, or at least he hopes so, because Pitt has taken his mousse and the glasses he doesn’t need anymore, and he feels vulnerable without them, half-naked.

“Better,” he tells Bond, because even plastic green is better than dead white, he knows.

“You don’t—” Bond starts, then stops.  He looks at Q, long enough to make him squirm.  Long enough to make him frightened.  “I’m sorry.”

It’s—he might have known.  Q pulls the blankets up, covers as much of his face as he can.  “It’s okay.  I understand.”  What else can he say?  What else should he say, when his only friend since death is horrified by the way he really looks?  Bond will leave now, he knows, and Q honestly can’t blame him.

Instead, Bond sits on the foot of the bed and produces a pack of cards.  Q’s scared through the first two rounds of gin; Bond is quiet and thoughtful, but by the start of a game of poker, they’ve relaxed.  It’s cozy, here in the darkened hospital room, and Q folds his hand with a pouting flourish.

“You’re lucky I like you too much to count cards,” he taunts.

“You’re unlucky I’m not so genteel,” Bond counters, grinning.

“You cheat!” Q gasps, feigning shock before grabbing the deck to shuffle again.  The bedside clock says it’s late—or early—and Bond will have to leave soon if he’s to avoid Pitt.  “Go away.  I don’t play with cheaters.”

“What about my forfeit?” Bond asks.  Q hands him the cards, now neatly boxed again, but he still looks expectant.

“What do you want?”  He doesn’t have much to give; already, his mind is whirling on thoughts of random bits of tech to make Bond’s missions easier—he trusts TSS, but Bond belongs to him, and if he leaves Q at this point, he’s not sure what he’d do.  He wants Bond safe, wants him cared for and watched and protected.

Bond startles him out of his thoughts with a finger on his jaw, and Q rolls into the simple touch before he realizes what he’s doing.  “Just,” Bond says, and then his lips are on Q’s, soft pressure and just the faintest touch of wet and.  Warm.  His lips are warm.

**Author's Note:**

> The [pretentious] title is from, of course, Frost's "Fire and Ice":
> 
>  
> 
> _"Some say the world will end in fire,_  
>  Some say in ice.  
> From what I’ve tasted of desire  
> I hold with those who favor fire.  
> But if it had to perish twice,  
> I think I know enough of hate  
> To say that for destruction ice  
> Is also great  
> And would suffice."


End file.
